Shrujan Karthik V – NPTEL STAR
In a quiet room in Coimbatore, long after college hours, Shrujan Karthik V sits at his desk, with a single blue pen in hand, a thick notebook open in front of him. The pages are filled with tight, running notes from NPTEL lectures – just concept after concept from lectures delivered by IIT professors. For this third-year ECE student from Kovilpatti, Tamil Nadu, these notebooks are his bridge to a dream he has been building quietly for years.
That dream goes back to 2017, when Shrujan was still in school and heard about NPTEL for the first time, long before he knew what to do with it. A place where anyone could learn anything from the same professors who teach at the IITs. The thought settled in and stayed. In September 2023, seven years later, Shrujan joined Sri Eshwar College of Engineering in Coimbatore, and it came back to him. The teachers there suggested students to take at least one NPTEL course each semester. It was there that NPTEL stopped being a name he had simply heard.
Quietly, NPTEL became the heart of his engineering education and his most trusted resource in preparing for one of India’s toughest competitive exams: GATE.
When Shrujan decided to prepare for GATE through NPTEL, the platform gave him everything he needed without having to piece it together from multiple places. Once he made up his mind, the routine flowed naturally. He would watch the whole lecture and fill his notebook as he went, then sit with those notes and go over them from start to finish before moving on to previous year questions, testing himself on nothing but what he had written down. On top of that, he regularly used NPTEL’s GATE Mock Test series to see how his preparation was holding up.
The results, when they came in, answered that question. Appearing in two GATE exams – ECE and Instrumentation Engineering as a third-year student is uncommon on its own; doing it while having covered the full syllabus is something else entirely. He got a strong score in Instrumentation and a modest one in ECE.
“For these scores, ninety to ninety-five percent of the credit goes to NPTEL,” he said.
Before he graduates, there is another attempt waiting, and this time he will not be starting from scratch.
He had always believed that once you leave college, no one is counting which institution is on your certificate. The gold medalist from a top campus and the determined student from anywhere else step into the same job market, sit for the same exams, run the same race. So he chose to build instead. He still keeps joining NPTEL courses because stopping simply didn’t occur to him.
Seven course certificates and becoming a “Domain Scholar” in VLSI Design had quietly made learning a habit. The latter earned him an invitation to the felicitation ceremony at IIT Madras.
He had to miss it because GATE was days away and he had come too far to break the pattern. He missed the stage, but not the dream.
Shrujan plans to stay the next time he walks into that campus. Not as a guest, but as a student – sitting in the same halls as the professors he has spent years watching on a screen. “It will be like seeing a hero from a movie in person after watching them for so long,” he said. He has been here before, in every way that matters. Walking in would simply close the distance.
– written by Nehansh Kesharwani